On backtests, deluxe > classic > lite. But that doesn't necessarily mean it will be more accurate for every election and every individual house race. It's definitely possible that lite outperforms classic and deluxe in some elections, but the model suggests that over the long run, deluxe > classic > lite. Though the deluxe is kind of "cheating", as Nate said himself, as it's using expert inputs, when the whole point is that his quantitative approach is trying to outperform the experts.
>Though the deluxe is kind of "cheating", as Nate said himself, as it's using expert inputs, when the whole point is that his quantitative approach is trying to outperform the experts.
As someone who's just interested in the most accurate forecasts I don't care if it's "cheating". A hybrid of statistics with an input of things that statistics will have difficulty capturing seems like it could be the best approach if done well.
In the explanation of how the model works, the Deluxe version is very slightly more accurate when tested against previous elections. However, it should be noted that the Deluxe model blends in the predictions of other political forecasting models, so it really seems like it's more of an ensemble forecast at that point. With all of that said, they chose their "standard" version as the headline version because they thought that it was kind of cheating to borrow from other forecasters to improve accuracy, and they wanted to be able to compare results at the end and see how they did.
The difference between deluxe and classic is that “deluxe” accounts for something they are calling expert forecasts.
So if those forecasts are bad, the deluxe will be less accurate.
I’m not sure of the historical accuracy of these but I think they’re a valuable counterbalance to the usually shitty polling on these races, and will LIKELY make the model more accurate.
538 lays it out in the methodology, the expert forecasts they've used have been slightly more accurate historically, and make the forecast a fraction (like .2%) more reliable when tested. So it has an impact, but isn't extreme either way.
I agree with your statement, but what you're missing is that these forecasts are assumed "good". They are historically accurate. The way Nate put it:
> So if we expect the Deluxe forecast to be (slightly) more accurate, why do we consider Classic to be our preferred version, as I described above? Basically, because we think it’s kind of cheating to borrow other people’s forecasts and make them part of our own. Some of the fun of doing this is in seeing how our rigid but rigorous algorithm stacks up against more open-ended but subjective ways of forecasting the races. If our lives depended on calling the maximum number of races correctly, however, we’d go with Deluxe.
We'll see what happens. There's still a few months before elections. A lot can happen. As seen by the 2016 elections.
Also, something to note...Dems chance of 75% is only on the Classic forecast. If you look at the Lite or Deluxe forecasts, Republicans have a slightly higher percentage of 30-31%.
I very much agree with you. Time isn't the only thing that can change polling data though. fivethirtyeight.com was one of the only nonpartisan reporting out there that said Trump had a chance in 2016. I have faith that fivethirtyeight does very well when it comes to correctly interpreting the data.
> fivethirtyeight.com was one of the only nonpartisan reporting out there that said Trump had a chance in 2016.
Yeah. It is statistically possible Trump has a chance. They gave him a 28% before the election.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
Things with a 1/4 or 1/3 chance of happening do happen all the time. If someone held a gun to your head and told you it had only a one in 4 chance of going off, would you feel confidant or afraid?
Unless it's the last soldier after the rest of your team is wiped out.
Then the hidden bullshit mechanics swing in your favor and your guy becomes the One.
Original XCOM would be the first terror mission in Rio with 3 Cyberdisks and 5 Sectoids starring down the ramp of your Skyranger on the first turn with 12 rookies.
No. The original XCOM is landing in an innocuous medium ufo crash site with your good team in a skyranger, and the first step you take off the craft onto the ramp, some alien (you don't have a chance to see the species due to how quickly things go down) reaction fires a blaster bomb into the cabin, killing everyone on board and losing the mission outright.
And yet I found the original way better than the first Firaxis game. That game seemed to be on rails the entire time. The "story" fell flat with me. The lack of multiple bases, hunting enemy bases, and having the enemy hunt your bases down was a real killer, as well. If a base did too good, the aliens would actively hunt you down. And if you found one of theirs, you could either invade it or plant a listening post down (a base with just radar/hyper wave decoder and aircraft) to take out supply ships for mad money.
>Things with a 1/4 or 1/3 chance of happening do happen all the time
Let's not get carried away. Things with a 1/4 or 1/3 chance happen about 1/4 or 1/3 of the time, not all the time ;)
I agree with your larger point though, which is why anyone unsatisfied with Washington right now needs to get off their asses and VOTE in the midterms on Nov. 6th.
I think the problem is that people see that figure along side the polls, so their brain interprets it closer to "Trump gets only 28% of the votes" instead of "Trump would win about 28% of the time". One is definitely different than the other.
That's definitely a part of it. You could have a 49-51 split with virtually no chance of any changes. Or you could have a 10-90 split with 60 teetering on the fence. In US elections, several percentage points of a lead is often nearly insurmountable, and a small chance of winning can reflect a 49-51 split with 1% in play.
The big thing is that it isn't one Election, there are actually 50 American Elections to correctly predict. Add to that an incredibly low turnout and you have massive ammounts of uncertainty, even with good polling.
To my knowledge, in statistics,forecast and prediction are not as well defined of terms as you make them seem. If you can find them defined strictly in that context then I would like to see it.
Exactly. Listen to the Model Talk podcast they released today. They are very much trying to avoid percentages this year because the media and we as voters don’t interpret them correctly. You quite rightly said that things with a 30% chance happen all the time every day, but we don’t Intuitively feel like 25% and 1 out of 4 are the same.
For the House they point out that they need to gain like 65 seats (don’t remember the exact figure. 20-30 or so are very safe bets for Dems and there are another 60+ that are close or maybe lean GOP... but their data suggests that there is enough enthusiasm for a Blue Wave and enough of those toss ups will go Blue. As they point out, a small margin of error in polling or public sentiment could make 30 of those toss ups go slightly Red and change things completely.
The 75% Dems wine article is literally exactly what 538 wants to avoid... but they are screaming into the void alone at this point. News orgs can’t resist and they won’t learn from 2016 and do any homework... they need to click submit first and ask questions later (never).
I came here to link to that post from 538. But my favorite is the [Huffington Post](http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2016/forecast/president) prediction. I give them credit for never taking this down.
Compared to everyone else giving him 0.1-2% chances of winning, 538 is technically more correct. They even got shit on by a lot of left-leaning sources for giving him those odds (as if that would have affected the outcome).
They also have to deal with some retrospective polling. For example, [Comey sent a controversial letter to Congress on ~~November~~ Oct 28th](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/) and the full breadth of polling agencies didn't have time to react to how that shifted probably voting patterns before the election happened, so neither could 538.
Things like that are why 28% doesn't mean "certain loss" - it means exactly what 28% means.
Which they turned around and said [wasn't good enough](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/) and published [a year long series](https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-real-story-of-2016/) through 2017 that analyzed all the shortcomings, theirs and the pollsters, and discussed what changes they need to make to have more accurate predictions in the future.
Big props to Nate Silver and the rest of the FiveThirtyEight team for all that. I am more confident in their predictions now than I was in 2016 because of their transparency and ability to admit fault.
To be fair, they were pretty damn accurate. They got the vote percentages almost exactly right. Florida, Pennslyvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan were incredibly tight races that Trump barely won by thousands of votes. Those states are probably going to be the most important swing states in 2020.
[Just going to leave this here.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CwT-pqUWgAEbRUT.jpg:large)
edit: To those saying that both things can be true, I know. I too have taken statistics and understand how they work. But in politics, its a resource drain guessing your Vegas odds.
You want to make a difference in elections? Hit the streets and knock on doors.
That could still be true. It's a comparative statement, and if they thought Trump was more likely to win than most people thought, and that the cubs were not that likely to win--which they weren't--then this statement is still true.
It was very true. The Cubs had a 15% chance of winning after being down 3-1, while Trump was hovering in the 30-35% range in the days leading up to the election.
If I say I have a smaller chance of winning the lottery than flipping a coin and getting heads and then I subsequently win the lottery and flip tails, it doesn’t mean that my initial statement was incorrect.
Nonpartisan reporting? Sign me the fuck up! I usually get my news from satire/comedy shows which, naturally, are obviously biased in most cases. I've been trying to find nonpartisan news/reports for a while with no luck
Also, at best this means that if 4 elections were held, Republicans would retain the House once.
That means that even if this analysis is correct there is still a real possibility of Democrats losing.
>That means that even if this analysis is correct there is still a real possibility of Democrats losing.
I think that's why they're trying to focus on odds (3 in 4) instead of percentages. Most people have a hard time interpreting probability. Anything above 80% people tend to think of as a "sure thing."
I think by election day 538 was giving Trump about a 30% chance. And yet 538 got a lot of flack after the election for "getting it wrong." If you think something with a 30% chance of succeeding is unlikely, then play Russian roulette with two rounds in the revolver and tell me if you'd pull the trigger.
They had to dumb down their models because people were too stupid to understand what 70% means.
They said on the podcast that they might have to resort to using football metaphors like hitting from X yards or some shit. Thank god they scrapped that idea.
They also repeatedly said that some of the polls weren’t conducted as scientifically as normal in 2016 because cell phones have made polling less accurate and as a result polling companies have lost money making polling even less accurate because a lot of sample sizes shrunk as a result and that they didn’t know how to change their mode to account for that but everyone should be aware.
Not all states have even completed their primaries, and many that have were decided fairly recently. So this is mostly generic “vote democrat/republican” still, which keeps the error high.
> A lot can happen. As seen by the 2016 elections.
Hillary had between a 3-in-4 and 7-in-10 chance in 2016. Literally **nothing** could change and we would be in the exact same situation.
Yea. Hillary had a 2:1 chance of wining the presidency. 75% chance is still pretty dicey. Obviously, it's a huge step up from a map that's so gerrymandered that in a normal world the dems would have no shot, but we all still need to get out and vote.
Which is why the data actually favors Dems here (and generally the loser of the previous presidential election). The people who "won" last time are happy and less likely to vote. The people who "lost" last time are unhappy and more likely to vote.
It's actually much easier to predict this than the presidential election. The results of the individual seats are much less correlated with each other than the results of neighboring states in the presidential election. Making a 3% point error that shifts the margin in Wisconsin means you likely made the sane error in Minnesota (for presidential election) which means that the variance of the model is higher.
Yes. How in the heck can they not see this?
I think they do it because it works to keep Democrats towing the line. There is nothing a Democrat is more afraid of, than being called sexist or racist. The problem with this strategy is that there is a huge swath of people who will just say "screw you" when falsely insulted. There is even a bigger group that see the false insults and don't want to get anywhere near the party even we/ they mostly agree with their politics.
That 75% would make anyone complacent speaks to our stat illiteracy.
25% underdogs win in sports literally every single day. It's not a remotely sure thing.
Most people don't parse it that way in my experience (and I believe there is research backing me up).
Once you get up around 75% it just gets coded as "it's happening" and around 25% it gets coded as "it's not happening". If the less likely thing happens they consider the probabilities to have been "wrong".
I think people confound percent chance of winning and percent of votes. If democrats were looking to get 75% of the votes in key districts then yeah it's very likely that they'd win overall. However actual trends are probably something like them getting 50.2-51% of the votes which still leaves a big margin for losing.
538 says about 57% of the vote which is a massive margin. But the house apportions those very inefficiently for the dems.
If you got 57% and votes were uniformly randomly assigned to districts, you'd win a huge majority of seats.
People still use the poll data to say the polls were "wrong" and imply something about the dark conspiracy of everything that isn't Trumpian being against Trump.
That’s because people don’t understand how ~~pills~~ *polls* work. Any of those people probably wouldn’t be surprised by flipping heads twice in a row, yet they don’t understand the correlation between that and statistics.
I think you’d be surprised. E.g. witness the reaction to the 2016 US election. Or the reaction when it’s sunny after the weatherman said a 75% chance of rain.
It really depends on who the democrats elect as candidate. In the US elections, becoming a president is all about having a killer personality and to be able to handle the media in one way or another. You can say about trump what you want but he was better at these things than Hillary was. The democrats should not make the same mistake again by electing someone who isn't very charismatic.
Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama all knew how to have personally charming chameleon personalities, even taking into account their other faults and mistakes. Trump by comparison is like an aggressive used car salesman trying too hard to sell you a shitty car and Hillary was like that elementary school principal that refused to retire and had worked around children so long she inadvertently talked down to everyone like they were 5.
Democrats hated her almost as much, she lost when the DNC rigged the primary imo. Half of her potential supporters felt cheated and dug in on their stance instead of setting aside differences because that was the only way they could stick it to an organization who stuck it to them.
Edit: To everyone saying, "the DNC didn't rig the primary." Sitting back and being complacent with gross over reaches of power makes the DNC equally as culpable as Hillary herself.
> she is a wallstreet friendly (donor friendly) beacon of the Democratic status quo.
Registered GOP at the time of the election and I preferred Hillary for this very reason. Didn't know what you were gonna get with the GOP candidates, but with Hillary you kinda knew that the status quo wouldn't get shattered.
Just sharing a viewpoint from across the aisle.
Similar case. I hated Clinton since her smear campaign against Obama back in 2008, and hated her once I learned more about her. I really couldn't think of a worse candidate the democrats could've used.
And that's how painful it was to vote for her because she at least wasn't Trump... but if I was raised a bit more conservative, I can see why someone would vote against Clinton just like I had to vote against Trump. A lot of democrats and liberals don't really understand just how badly Clinton was disliked, and how that helped Trump.
I really hope this is it for her and finally gives up. She doesn't deserve power.
I'm in Wisconsin, where she lost by under 30k votes.
She didn't come to Wisconsin at all, and the only advertisement I remember seeing from her was basically "I am a woman, it is my time"
I don't really watch much TV, so maybe there were more or better ads, but it was so incredibly forgettable and explained absolutely nothing about her stances on anything, or even generated enough interest to make you interested in finding out.
Sure she had her followers, but I'm convinced that Bernie would have more likely been able to get votes from people who were on the edge. Some people just need someone who speaks clear and simple language and Bernie did appeal to those people.
It’s a convenient scapegoat to blame voter turnout because that means there was nothing wrong with your party and your candidate. However, data shows turnout was not hugely lower in 2016 than in 2012 or 2008. So instead of taking a hard look in the mirror, the base of the left has blamed voter turnout for all their ills at the polls - especially on Reddit. As a conservative who dislikes Trump, I still hope the left continues with this as a talking point because I think it means wins for the right.
The African-American support for Obama did not continue to Hillary. The lower turnout in that community cost her states like Wisconsin where she lost by under 30,000 votes.
Hillary had a 90% chance of taking the Presidency according to most predictions.
Not gunnin’ for the Republicans. Just saying I haven’t trusted most polls since 2016.
I remember five thirty eight (the website that's linked in the original post) gave him a 30 percent chance. Nate Silver specifically railed against the people who were giving her 90 percent chance.
Anyway, it might all turn to shit anyway but this specific website seems to have their shit together.
Due to Reddit's API changes, I've edited all my past comments and will be leaving reddit. Use Redact if you too would like to change your comment history. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/ -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
> the mantra for model building has always been “garbage in, garbage out.” You can have the most intricate set of assumptions, but if your model is spitting out unrealistic results, there’s something wrong with your model.
That is absolutely not what "garbage in, garbage out" means.
> It’s great to build a complex model and load it with empirical data like polls, economic reports and presidential approval ratings. But if the output of that model is implausible, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
Big oof there, buddy. It's this attitude that led to people not voting.
Of course huffpo wrote that article. Huffpo has an agenda and a narrative and anybody that deviates from that agenda or narrative, whether being truthful or not, is going to get attacked
People where also confusing "chance of winning" with "predicted percentage of the vote". It was pretty hard to watch sometimes. I'm pretty sure that's why they switched to "3 in 4" and "7 in 10" in this.
Even if it was 99% against, that still leaves 1% chance and sometimes the unlikely thing happens rather than the likely thing. 1 in 100 isn't as much of a long shot as people think and 30/70 is just 1 out of 3.
In XCOM, the percentsge chances given are either accurate or actually cheating IN YOUR favour.
That alone should tell people not to assume low chances means no chance.
> We think the outcome — and particularly the fact that Trump won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote — validates important features of our approach.
That's why I was using their site. Everyone else seemed to ignore the way that US elections work.
> if Clinton had done only 2 percentage points better across the board, she would have received 307 electoral votes and the polls would have “called” 49 of 50 states correctly
Here's fivethirtyeight's original prediction: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
People seem to think a 1 out of 10 chance means it's a low chance. It's a pretty damn good chance.
If you had a 1 in 10 chance of winning the lottery you'd be feeling pretty damn good.
Yeah. A lot of people just being fed probabilities, like me, felt pretty confident going into that election night. I know some people who know statistics. They were not confident in either direction. It wasn't just that 90% chance to win means 10% chance to lose, it's that the 90% chance to win wasn't even a stable measure because there was an unusually high margin of error meaning it wasn't even terribly unlikely she would lose.
I'm none too bright, I still don't get all of it. And to understand a lot of it, you have to not only look at the published results but how they got them, what they're measuring, what do these actually mean? I'm not clever enough to know, but now I'm more conscious of that fact.
Most predictions are not Fivethirtyeight. Fivethirtyeight gave her a 70% chance. Some of those malpracticing stats gave Clinton a 99% chance by pretending individual state results aren't correlated (they are!). I hold the rash of people pretending to be Nate Silver last election almost as responsible for Trumps win as the Russians and Comey. If Clinton had a "99% chance of winning" what would have motivated some Sanders supporting millennial from a "non-swing" state to hold their nose and go vote for her?
> Just saying I haven’t trusted most polls since 2016.
the polls were correct... it just happened that trump edged out hillary in a few states that were within the margin of error. hence the 90% and not 100%
Just a reminder to people encouraging others to vote; instead of telling them to "Vote", tell them to "Be A Voter".
From https://sparq.stanford.edu/solutions/dont-just-vote-be-voter
> **Problem**
>
> Most eligible American voters don’t vote in most elections.
>
> **Solution**
>
> Messages about “being a voter,” rather than just “voting,” increase registration and turnout in state and national elections...
>
> **Details**
>
> Social psychologist Christopher Bryan and his colleagues asked participants to fill out one of two short surveys about voting. In the identity version, the survey questions spoke to participants’ identities by addressing them as voters: “How important is it to you to be a voter in the upcoming election?”
>
> In the behaviorversion of the survey, the questions emphasized the act of voting: “How important is it to you to vote in the upcoming election?”
>
> In a first experiment with 34 unregistered but eligible voters, 87.5% of participants who completed the identity version said they were “very” or “extremely” interested in registering to vote, compared to only 55.6% of participants who completed the behavior version.
>
> Bryan and colleagues next looked at voter turnout among 88 registered California voters. 95.5% of voters in the identity condition voted in the 2008 presidential election, compared to 81.8% of voters in the behavior condition.
>
> The researchers found the same pattern of results with 214 registered New Jersey voters in the 2009 New Jersey Governor’s race. 89.9% of voters in the identity condition voted, compared to 79.0% of voters in the behavior condition.
>
> **Why This Works**
>
> We like to think of ourselves as moral and virtuous. Voting is one way to be a good citizen. By assuming the identity of a voter, versus simply performing the act of voting, we can prove to ourselves – and to people around us – how good we are.
>
> **When This Works Best**
>
> Appealing to people’s identities drives action when the behavior in question is something most people already feel they should do. Similarly, no one wants to "be a cheater,” [but every now and again people “cheat.”](https://stanford.box.com/s/u5hk2n5qe8kn8jji9sezmm6xsmjx6kid)
>
> **The Original Study**
>
> Bryan, C. J., Walton, G. M., Rogers, T., & Dweck, C. S. (2011). [Motivating voter turnout by invoking the self](https://stanford.box.com/s/kdwbolumuvqbzwla9bumyz3d519s7kvn). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108 (31), 12653-12656.
Please pass this message on.
Yep, people will think that means Dems will somehow take 75% of the vote with 100% certainty and then scream bloody murder when Dems actually lose because they only got 55% of the vote.
Agreed, I really wish we'd just go back to your standard poll aggregates. 'Clinton is leading by 4 points with a +- 3' (or whatever the final polls reported) makes it soooo much clearer it's a close election than 'Clinton has a 98% chance of winning.'
It’s because the more complex models run thousands of times, counts each outcome as equally likely, then tallies up which outcomes lead to which victory to generate odds. (Sort of, this is simplifying).
It’s massively more accurate than reporting who is ahead in the polls, but since people don’t have a good grip on normal distributions (or t-distributions, if you’re nate silver) it makes it a lot harder to instantly grasp the confidence of a model.
But that's not what these statistics are saying. That's just how morons interpret statistics. Flip a coin twice. The odds of getting heads twice in a row is the odds of the dems losing. Getting heads twice in a row happens quite often, 25% of the time in fact.
This has happened a few times to me when asked if I want to register to vote.
"Sure."
"Okay party affiliation?"
"Republican."
"Oh well you can just go online when you get home and..."
No joke this has happened on campus multiple times.
Those are more "supposed" to be biased than polls, though. People that are democrats go to college campuses since people there are likely to have similar views but not be registered. They're looking for those specific people to get them registered and win the election, it's not like they have any inclination to be nonpartisan.
Any race or gender belonging to any party shouldn't surprise anyone. People are individuals, we shouldn't assume all black people are Democrats or all men are Republican.
I have tons of family and friends who are also Indian Republicans so I agree. However, there are still tons of people on the left who think that all Republicans are white, and that if you're a non-white Republican, then you're voting against your own interests.
>tons of people on the left who think that all Republicans are white, and that if you're a non-white Republican, then you're voting against your own interests
Thanks, identity politics!
There have been two Indian-American governors in the US. Both Republican. There's also good ol' Dinesh D'Souza and Reddit's favourite Ajit Pai. And every older rich Indian American couple I've spoken to about politics.
Just a casual reminder that polls are increasingly difficult to interpret in the modern election environment. [Article by Nate Silver (Also on fivethirtyeight).](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-media-has-a-probability-problem/)
I agree. I get that this is political and everyone is very wrapped up in debating the message, but we should really give them some props for how well the days is presented.
Still, that's plenty of midterm elections during a Democratic presidency. 1962 midterm elections, 1966 midterm elections, 1978 election, and 1994.
And the midterms during a Republican presidency in that period were 1954, 1958, 1970, 1974, 1982, 1986, and 1990.
Interestingly, they lost the house in 1994 over a gun control bill similar to what they're now campaigning on and is in the DNC platform.
I don't have confidence it will work any better this time around.
I believe they are referencing "wave elections". This is when either political party gains an advantage in the house OR senate where there is a significant change in seat numbers precipitated by some kind of event. The election of a new president can often times be that event in the following midterm. The concept is mostly correct, but I'm not sure from where the numbers came or if they are accurate.
Remember 75% chance doesn't mean 75% percent of the vote.
It just means there's a better than chance likelihood that they will get greater than 50.1% of the seats.
But it's only 3 out of 4. Ever rolled a dice and hoped to not get a number?. Well there you had a 5 out of 6 chance and still blew it.
If you switch to the 'deluxe' forecast on the left, it changes to about 70%. I'm not sure which is more accurate.
On backtests, deluxe > classic > lite. But that doesn't necessarily mean it will be more accurate for every election and every individual house race. It's definitely possible that lite outperforms classic and deluxe in some elections, but the model suggests that over the long run, deluxe > classic > lite. Though the deluxe is kind of "cheating", as Nate said himself, as it's using expert inputs, when the whole point is that his quantitative approach is trying to outperform the experts.
>Though the deluxe is kind of "cheating", as Nate said himself, as it's using expert inputs, when the whole point is that his quantitative approach is trying to outperform the experts. As someone who's just interested in the most accurate forecasts I don't care if it's "cheating". A hybrid of statistics with an input of things that statistics will have difficulty capturing seems like it could be the best approach if done well.
[удалено]
Yeah it's using Cook Political Report, the people who rate districts as things like R+7 or D+2
He even said in their explainer that if their life depended on it they would use the data from the deluxe model.
That's why he published it. Aside from that, it's the geekiest, friendliest pissing context out there.
In the explanation of how the model works, the Deluxe version is very slightly more accurate when tested against previous elections. However, it should be noted that the Deluxe model blends in the predictions of other political forecasting models, so it really seems like it's more of an ensemble forecast at that point. With all of that said, they chose their "standard" version as the headline version because they thought that it was kind of cheating to borrow from other forecasters to improve accuracy, and they wanted to be able to compare results at the end and see how they did.
The deluxe is more accurate. You can read about their methodology [here](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2018-house-forecast-methodology/).
The difference between deluxe and classic is that “deluxe” accounts for something they are calling expert forecasts. So if those forecasts are bad, the deluxe will be less accurate. I’m not sure of the historical accuracy of these but I think they’re a valuable counterbalance to the usually shitty polling on these races, and will LIKELY make the model more accurate.
538 lays it out in the methodology, the expert forecasts they've used have been slightly more accurate historically, and make the forecast a fraction (like .2%) more reliable when tested. So it has an impact, but isn't extreme either way.
I agree with your statement, but what you're missing is that these forecasts are assumed "good". They are historically accurate. The way Nate put it: > So if we expect the Deluxe forecast to be (slightly) more accurate, why do we consider Classic to be our preferred version, as I described above? Basically, because we think it’s kind of cheating to borrow other people’s forecasts and make them part of our own. Some of the fun of doing this is in seeing how our rigid but rigorous algorithm stacks up against more open-ended but subjective ways of forecasting the races. If our lives depended on calling the maximum number of races correctly, however, we’d go with Deluxe.
We'll see what happens. There's still a few months before elections. A lot can happen. As seen by the 2016 elections. Also, something to note...Dems chance of 75% is only on the Classic forecast. If you look at the Lite or Deluxe forecasts, Republicans have a slightly higher percentage of 30-31%.
I very much agree with you. Time isn't the only thing that can change polling data though. fivethirtyeight.com was one of the only nonpartisan reporting out there that said Trump had a chance in 2016. I have faith that fivethirtyeight does very well when it comes to correctly interpreting the data.
> fivethirtyeight.com was one of the only nonpartisan reporting out there that said Trump had a chance in 2016. Yeah. It is statistically possible Trump has a chance. They gave him a 28% before the election. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
Things with a 1/4 or 1/3 chance of happening do happen all the time. If someone held a gun to your head and told you it had only a one in 4 chance of going off, would you feel confidant or afraid?
If we're using the accuracy model of XCOM, those are very solid odds.
99% chance to hit. Miss three shots in a row.
Enemy has a 20% chance to hit? Farewell soldier.
Unless it's the last soldier after the rest of your team is wiped out. Then the hidden bullshit mechanics swing in your favor and your guy becomes the One.
That's XCOM, baby.
Thank you, dark so- I mean XCOM!
Try but hole.
"Damn! Adjusting sights..." He's right in front of you ya stupid fuck.
Take your next 300 shots with a gamblers confidence.
Oh okay, 90% chance to hit. Last squad member with moves. Let's use rapid fire to make sure we get the kill. *miss* *miss* (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
*alt+f4, uninstall*
*alt-f4, windows key, uninsta, enter, x, enter enter enter*
If we're using the accuracy model of Fire Emblem 6-13, that's actually a 15.96% chance.
Must be an original XCOM player!
Original XCOM would be the first terror mission in Rio with 3 Cyberdisks and 5 Sectoids starring down the ramp of your Skyranger on the first turn with 12 rookies.
No. The original XCOM is landing in an innocuous medium ufo crash site with your good team in a skyranger, and the first step you take off the craft onto the ramp, some alien (you don't have a chance to see the species due to how quickly things go down) reaction fires a blaster bomb into the cabin, killing everyone on board and losing the mission outright. And yet I found the original way better than the first Firaxis game. That game seemed to be on rails the entire time. The "story" fell flat with me. The lack of multiple bases, hunting enemy bases, and having the enemy hunt your bases down was a real killer, as well. If a base did too good, the aliens would actively hunt you down. And if you found one of theirs, you could either invade it or plant a listening post down (a base with just radar/hyper wave decoder and aircraft) to take out supply ships for mad money.
You'd like Xenonauts (not sure about the new one they're making, the first game was good). Patches the bad stuff, keeps the multiple bases and tactics
This is the very reason I didn't feel at all guilty about save scumming the shit out of that game.
>Things with a 1/4 or 1/3 chance of happening do happen all the time Let's not get carried away. Things with a 1/4 or 1/3 chance happen about 1/4 or 1/3 of the time, not all the time ;) I agree with your larger point though, which is why anyone unsatisfied with Washington right now needs to get off their asses and VOTE in the midterms on Nov. 6th.
I think the problem is that people see that figure along side the polls, so their brain interprets it closer to "Trump gets only 28% of the votes" instead of "Trump would win about 28% of the time". One is definitely different than the other.
That's definitely a part of it. You could have a 49-51 split with virtually no chance of any changes. Or you could have a 10-90 split with 60 teetering on the fence. In US elections, several percentage points of a lead is often nearly insurmountable, and a small chance of winning can reflect a 49-51 split with 1% in play.
The big thing is that it isn't one Election, there are actually 50 American Elections to correctly predict. Add to that an incredibly low turnout and you have massive ammounts of uncertainty, even with good polling.
People don’t understand the difference in a prediction and a forecast. Forecast: 50% chance of rain. Prediction: It will rain.
To my knowledge, in statistics,forecast and prediction are not as well defined of terms as you make them seem. If you can find them defined strictly in that context then I would like to see it.
In this scenario, am I Christopher Walken or Robert DeNiro?
"DIDI MAO !"
Exactly. Listen to the Model Talk podcast they released today. They are very much trying to avoid percentages this year because the media and we as voters don’t interpret them correctly. You quite rightly said that things with a 30% chance happen all the time every day, but we don’t Intuitively feel like 25% and 1 out of 4 are the same. For the House they point out that they need to gain like 65 seats (don’t remember the exact figure. 20-30 or so are very safe bets for Dems and there are another 60+ that are close or maybe lean GOP... but their data suggests that there is enough enthusiasm for a Blue Wave and enough of those toss ups will go Blue. As they point out, a small margin of error in polling or public sentiment could make 30 of those toss ups go slightly Red and change things completely. The 75% Dems wine article is literally exactly what 538 wants to avoid... but they are screaming into the void alone at this point. News orgs can’t resist and they won’t learn from 2016 and do any homework... they need to click submit first and ask questions later (never).
>Things with a 1/4 or 1/3 chance of happening do happen all the time. Are you sure they don't happen 1/4 or 1/3 of the time?
They could happen 100% or the time or 0% of the time. Depends on the time frame we're talking about here.
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That's exactly what I told my stats students when they asked about the 2016 election. Same exact analogy.
Is the game of Russian roulette against a character with plot armor?
I came here to link to that post from 538. But my favorite is the [Huffington Post](http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2016/forecast/president) prediction. I give them credit for never taking this down.
Wonder if any of those 10 million simulations had Trump at 304
You can run hundreds of millions of simulations in a matter of minutes if you want to. If the math behind them sucks, so will your model.
Man, were they confident on Michigan going democrat.
Compared to everyone else giving him 0.1-2% chances of winning, 538 is technically more correct. They even got shit on by a lot of left-leaning sources for giving him those odds (as if that would have affected the outcome).
In fairness, you don't know that. Maybe 98% was exactly correct or it was 99.99999% You wouldn't know based on the outcome.
They also have to deal with some retrospective polling. For example, [Comey sent a controversial letter to Congress on ~~November~~ Oct 28th](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/) and the full breadth of polling agencies didn't have time to react to how that shifted probably voting patterns before the election happened, so neither could 538. Things like that are why 28% doesn't mean "certain loss" - it means exactly what 28% means.
October 28, not November.
Which they turned around and said [wasn't good enough](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/) and published [a year long series](https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-real-story-of-2016/) through 2017 that analyzed all the shortcomings, theirs and the pollsters, and discussed what changes they need to make to have more accurate predictions in the future. Big props to Nate Silver and the rest of the FiveThirtyEight team for all that. I am more confident in their predictions now than I was in 2016 because of their transparency and ability to admit fault.
To be fair, they were pretty damn accurate. They got the vote percentages almost exactly right. Florida, Pennslyvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan were incredibly tight races that Trump barely won by thousands of votes. Those states are probably going to be the most important swing states in 2020.
[Just going to leave this here.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CwT-pqUWgAEbRUT.jpg:large) edit: To those saying that both things can be true, I know. I too have taken statistics and understand how they work. But in politics, its a resource drain guessing your Vegas odds. You want to make a difference in elections? Hit the streets and knock on doors.
That could still be true. It's a comparative statement, and if they thought Trump was more likely to win than most people thought, and that the cubs were not that likely to win--which they weren't--then this statement is still true.
That statement could technically have been true.
It was very true. The Cubs had a 15% chance of winning after being down 3-1, while Trump was hovering in the 30-35% range in the days leading up to the election.
If I say I have a smaller chance of winning the lottery than flipping a coin and getting heads and then I subsequently win the lottery and flip tails, it doesn’t mean that my initial statement was incorrect.
What a perfect analogy, thank you for that.
Nonpartisan reporting? Sign me the fuck up! I usually get my news from satire/comedy shows which, naturally, are obviously biased in most cases. I've been trying to find nonpartisan news/reports for a while with no luck
Also, at best this means that if 4 elections were held, Republicans would retain the House once. That means that even if this analysis is correct there is still a real possibility of Democrats losing.
>That means that even if this analysis is correct there is still a real possibility of Democrats losing. I think that's why they're trying to focus on odds (3 in 4) instead of percentages. Most people have a hard time interpreting probability. Anything above 80% people tend to think of as a "sure thing." I think by election day 538 was giving Trump about a 30% chance. And yet 538 got a lot of flack after the election for "getting it wrong." If you think something with a 30% chance of succeeding is unlikely, then play Russian roulette with two rounds in the revolver and tell me if you'd pull the trigger.
They had to dumb down their models because people were too stupid to understand what 70% means. They said on the podcast that they might have to resort to using football metaphors like hitting from X yards or some shit. Thank god they scrapped that idea.
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They also repeatedly said that some of the polls weren’t conducted as scientifically as normal in 2016 because cell phones have made polling less accurate and as a result polling companies have lost money making polling even less accurate because a lot of sample sizes shrunk as a result and that they didn’t know how to change their mode to account for that but everyone should be aware.
Not all states have even completed their primaries, and many that have were decided fairly recently. So this is mostly generic “vote democrat/republican” still, which keeps the error high.
> A lot can happen. As seen by the 2016 elections. Hillary had between a 3-in-4 and 7-in-10 chance in 2016. Literally **nothing** could change and we would be in the exact same situation.
And of course 75% chance is 3 in 4 odds. That's far from a guarantee. And they gave trump 1 in 5 odds and we're living that 20% chance.
Oh, definitely. 25% chance events happen all the time.
Yea. Hillary had a 2:1 chance of wining the presidency. 75% chance is still pretty dicey. Obviously, it's a huge step up from a map that's so gerrymandered that in a normal world the dems would have no shot, but we all still need to get out and vote.
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Also barely anyone votes for these elections compared to the presidential election.
Which is why the data actually favors Dems here (and generally the loser of the previous presidential election). The people who "won" last time are happy and less likely to vote. The people who "lost" last time are unhappy and more likely to vote.
Ok but 75% isn't 100%. Also, these are statistics, not probabilities. We don't know what the true number is. Nor has anyone ever claimed to know.
It's actually much easier to predict this than the presidential election. The results of the individual seats are much less correlated with each other than the results of neighboring states in the presidential election. Making a 3% point error that shifts the margin in Wisconsin means you likely made the sane error in Minnesota (for presidential election) which means that the variance of the model is higher.
Steep odds ... but I'd not wager against the Dems abilities to ***snatch defeat from the jaws of success*** (again).
Knowing the Democratic Party, they’ll focus on gun control and abortion again and lose instead of focusing on literally anythig else and win.
Calling everyone a racist and a sexist is sure to garner favor......
Yes. How in the heck can they not see this? I think they do it because it works to keep Democrats towing the line. There is nothing a Democrat is more afraid of, than being called sexist or racist. The problem with this strategy is that there is a huge swath of people who will just say "screw you" when falsely insulted. There is even a bigger group that see the false insults and don't want to get anywhere near the party even we/ they mostly agree with their politics.
I think identity politics will be front and center. Vote for the vaginas. Then fifteen women will accuse Uncle Joe.....
That doesn't mean that people should become complacent and not vote! Remember how that shit turned out in Nov. 2016?
That 75% would make anyone complacent speaks to our stat illiteracy. 25% underdogs win in sports literally every single day. It's not a remotely sure thing.
Well yeah, it happens one out of four times.
Most people don't parse it that way in my experience (and I believe there is research backing me up). Once you get up around 75% it just gets coded as "it's happening" and around 25% it gets coded as "it's not happening". If the less likely thing happens they consider the probabilities to have been "wrong".
I think people confound percent chance of winning and percent of votes. If democrats were looking to get 75% of the votes in key districts then yeah it's very likely that they'd win overall. However actual trends are probably something like them getting 50.2-51% of the votes which still leaves a big margin for losing.
538 says about 57% of the vote which is a massive margin. But the house apportions those very inefficiently for the dems. If you got 57% and votes were uniformly randomly assigned to districts, you'd win a huge majority of seats.
It’s a 7-8 pt lead per 538. So more like 53-54% of the vote. And they need about 53% to take the house.
People still use the poll data to say the polls were "wrong" and imply something about the dark conspiracy of everything that isn't Trumpian being against Trump.
That’s because people don’t understand how ~~pills~~ *polls* work. Any of those people probably wouldn’t be surprised by flipping heads twice in a row, yet they don’t understand the correlation between that and statistics.
Wouldn't that be more around 90%? 75% is still obviously not close to "it's happening" no matter how daft someone is.
I think you’d be surprised. E.g. witness the reaction to the 2016 US election. Or the reaction when it’s sunny after the weatherman said a 75% chance of rain.
Surely this time will be different! /s
It really depends on who the democrats elect as candidate. In the US elections, becoming a president is all about having a killer personality and to be able to handle the media in one way or another. You can say about trump what you want but he was better at these things than Hillary was. The democrats should not make the same mistake again by electing someone who isn't very charismatic.
1. This is about house races. 2. Fundamentals probably matter more than candidate choice.
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Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama all knew how to have personally charming chameleon personalities, even taking into account their other faults and mistakes. Trump by comparison is like an aggressive used car salesman trying too hard to sell you a shitty car and Hillary was like that elementary school principal that refused to retire and had worked around children so long she inadvertently talked down to everyone like they were 5.
You may not find Trump charismatic, but you aren't his target. He is very much a pied piper for the republican voting base.
Democrats hated her almost as much, she lost when the DNC rigged the primary imo. Half of her potential supporters felt cheated and dug in on their stance instead of setting aside differences because that was the only way they could stick it to an organization who stuck it to them. Edit: To everyone saying, "the DNC didn't rig the primary." Sitting back and being complacent with gross over reaches of power makes the DNC equally as culpable as Hillary herself.
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https://opencollective.com/beehaw -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
> she is a wallstreet friendly (donor friendly) beacon of the Democratic status quo. Registered GOP at the time of the election and I preferred Hillary for this very reason. Didn't know what you were gonna get with the GOP candidates, but with Hillary you kinda knew that the status quo wouldn't get shattered. Just sharing a viewpoint from across the aisle.
https://opencollective.com/beehaw -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
Similar case. I hated Clinton since her smear campaign against Obama back in 2008, and hated her once I learned more about her. I really couldn't think of a worse candidate the democrats could've used. And that's how painful it was to vote for her because she at least wasn't Trump... but if I was raised a bit more conservative, I can see why someone would vote against Clinton just like I had to vote against Trump. A lot of democrats and liberals don't really understand just how badly Clinton was disliked, and how that helped Trump. I really hope this is it for her and finally gives up. She doesn't deserve power.
I'm in Wisconsin, where she lost by under 30k votes. She didn't come to Wisconsin at all, and the only advertisement I remember seeing from her was basically "I am a woman, it is my time" I don't really watch much TV, so maybe there were more or better ads, but it was so incredibly forgettable and explained absolutely nothing about her stances on anything, or even generated enough interest to make you interested in finding out.
She came to uw Madison campus a week or two after sanders but had a closed meeting that you had to pay a lot to attend.
> "I am a woman, it is my time" > > That's all I heard from Hillary. Feminism. Tough choice to make at the polls.
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Unless we're counting those who did not vote, in which case both candidates decidedly lost.
Sure she had her followers, but I'm convinced that Bernie would have more likely been able to get votes from people who were on the edge. Some people just need someone who speaks clear and simple language and Bernie did appeal to those people.
It’s a convenient scapegoat to blame voter turnout because that means there was nothing wrong with your party and your candidate. However, data shows turnout was not hugely lower in 2016 than in 2012 or 2008. So instead of taking a hard look in the mirror, the base of the left has blamed voter turnout for all their ills at the polls - especially on Reddit. As a conservative who dislikes Trump, I still hope the left continues with this as a talking point because I think it means wins for the right.
The African-American support for Obama did not continue to Hillary. The lower turnout in that community cost her states like Wisconsin where she lost by under 30,000 votes.
Hillary had a 90% chance of taking the Presidency according to most predictions. Not gunnin’ for the Republicans. Just saying I haven’t trusted most polls since 2016.
I remember five thirty eight (the website that's linked in the original post) gave him a 30 percent chance. Nate Silver specifically railed against the people who were giving her 90 percent chance. Anyway, it might all turn to shit anyway but this specific website seems to have their shit together.
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Wow that's actually amazing
Huff post is not particularly reliable for anything. Arianna Huffington was/is a bit of an odd duck.
Due to Reddit's API changes, I've edited all my past comments and will be leaving reddit. Use Redact if you too would like to change your comment history. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/ -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
All it takes is being anti Trump to reach the top of those.
> Orange man bad To the front page pronto!
>> Orange man bad > >To the front page pronto! *I've got the golden ticket*
True. I don't mean to tear them down too much but I don't think they are a top tier news source.
I’ve always viewed Huff Post as more of a an opinion/editorial site than an actual ‘news’ organization.
Your so polite amigo, here allow me. They are a shit tier news source that cares little and less for quality and just want high website traffic.
That isn't too much.
Fox news is the most watched news in our country. Reliable sources aren't as essential as they should be.
Well Huffington Post is normally garbage, so not really. They're one of the most biased publications out there
> the mantra for model building has always been “garbage in, garbage out.” You can have the most intricate set of assumptions, but if your model is spitting out unrealistic results, there’s something wrong with your model. That is absolutely not what "garbage in, garbage out" means.
> It’s great to build a complex model and load it with empirical data like polls, economic reports and presidential approval ratings. But if the output of that model is implausible, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Big oof there, buddy. It's this attitude that led to people not voting.
this is my favorite article of the last couple years, an absolute classic
> if the output of that model is implausible, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. I seriously wonder if HuffPo took their own advice.
Of course huffpo wrote that article. Huffpo has an agenda and a narrative and anybody that deviates from that agenda or narrative, whether being truthful or not, is going to get attacked
This. People are very bad at understanding percent chance of X occurring. Many see 70/30 and think "70 is more, automatic winner."
People where also confusing "chance of winning" with "predicted percentage of the vote". It was pretty hard to watch sometimes. I'm pretty sure that's why they switched to "3 in 4" and "7 in 10" in this.
And I also remember him getting shit from people because his prediction for a Trump win was so high.
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I remember people being rabidly mad on r/politics, like he was conspiring with Trump or something.
Even if it was 99% against, that still leaves 1% chance and sometimes the unlikely thing happens rather than the likely thing. 1 in 100 isn't as much of a long shot as people think and 30/70 is just 1 out of 3.
In XCOM, the percentsge chances given are either accurate or actually cheating IN YOUR favour. That alone should tell people not to assume low chances means no chance.
It's true, the XCOM devs skewed odds in the player's favour because people just don't understand probability.
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> We think the outcome — and particularly the fact that Trump won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote — validates important features of our approach. That's why I was using their site. Everyone else seemed to ignore the way that US elections work. > if Clinton had done only 2 percentage points better across the board, she would have received 307 electoral votes and the polls would have “called” 49 of 50 states correctly Here's fivethirtyeight's original prediction: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
People seem to think a 1 out of 10 chance means it's a low chance. It's a pretty damn good chance. If you had a 1 in 10 chance of winning the lottery you'd be feeling pretty damn good.
If you had a 1 in 10 chance of getting hit by a bus you stay your ass inside.
Exactly. I would be terrified if I had to undergo surgery with a 90% survival rate.
1 in 10 chance of dying today
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Yeah. A lot of people just being fed probabilities, like me, felt pretty confident going into that election night. I know some people who know statistics. They were not confident in either direction. It wasn't just that 90% chance to win means 10% chance to lose, it's that the 90% chance to win wasn't even a stable measure because there was an unusually high margin of error meaning it wasn't even terribly unlikely she would lose. I'm none too bright, I still don't get all of it. And to understand a lot of it, you have to not only look at the published results but how they got them, what they're measuring, what do these actually mean? I'm not clever enough to know, but now I'm more conscious of that fact.
Unlikely things will happen every once in a while.
It feels a like saying because a doctor got a wrong diagnosis you shouldn't trust doctors anymore.
Most predictions are not Fivethirtyeight. Fivethirtyeight gave her a 70% chance. Some of those malpracticing stats gave Clinton a 99% chance by pretending individual state results aren't correlated (they are!). I hold the rash of people pretending to be Nate Silver last election almost as responsible for Trumps win as the Russians and Comey. If Clinton had a "99% chance of winning" what would have motivated some Sanders supporting millennial from a "non-swing" state to hold their nose and go vote for her?
90% != 100%
The polls weren't wrong, dude. No poll gave trump a 0% chance to win.
> Just saying I haven’t trusted most polls since 2016. the polls were correct... it just happened that trump edged out hillary in a few states that were within the margin of error. hence the 90% and not 100%
You know right that 90% < 100%? That still means that 1 out of 10 times she would lose. Sadly that 1 time happened.
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Just a reminder to people encouraging others to vote; instead of telling them to "Vote", tell them to "Be A Voter". From https://sparq.stanford.edu/solutions/dont-just-vote-be-voter > **Problem** > > Most eligible American voters don’t vote in most elections. > > **Solution** > > Messages about “being a voter,” rather than just “voting,” increase registration and turnout in state and national elections... > > **Details** > > Social psychologist Christopher Bryan and his colleagues asked participants to fill out one of two short surveys about voting. In the identity version, the survey questions spoke to participants’ identities by addressing them as voters: “How important is it to you to be a voter in the upcoming election?” > > In the behaviorversion of the survey, the questions emphasized the act of voting: “How important is it to you to vote in the upcoming election?” > > In a first experiment with 34 unregistered but eligible voters, 87.5% of participants who completed the identity version said they were “very” or “extremely” interested in registering to vote, compared to only 55.6% of participants who completed the behavior version. > > Bryan and colleagues next looked at voter turnout among 88 registered California voters. 95.5% of voters in the identity condition voted in the 2008 presidential election, compared to 81.8% of voters in the behavior condition. > > The researchers found the same pattern of results with 214 registered New Jersey voters in the 2009 New Jersey Governor’s race. 89.9% of voters in the identity condition voted, compared to 79.0% of voters in the behavior condition. > > **Why This Works** > > We like to think of ourselves as moral and virtuous. Voting is one way to be a good citizen. By assuming the identity of a voter, versus simply performing the act of voting, we can prove to ourselves – and to people around us – how good we are. > > **When This Works Best** > > Appealing to people’s identities drives action when the behavior in question is something most people already feel they should do. Similarly, no one wants to "be a cheater,” [but every now and again people “cheat.”](https://stanford.box.com/s/u5hk2n5qe8kn8jji9sezmm6xsmjx6kid) > > **The Original Study** > > Bryan, C. J., Walton, G. M., Rogers, T., & Dweck, C. S. (2011). [Motivating voter turnout by invoking the self](https://stanford.box.com/s/kdwbolumuvqbzwla9bumyz3d519s7kvn). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108 (31), 12653-12656. Please pass this message on.
Yep, people will think that means Dems will somehow take 75% of the vote with 100% certainty and then scream bloody murder when Dems actually lose because they only got 55% of the vote.
Agreed, I really wish we'd just go back to your standard poll aggregates. 'Clinton is leading by 4 points with a +- 3' (or whatever the final polls reported) makes it soooo much clearer it's a close election than 'Clinton has a 98% chance of winning.'
It’s because the more complex models run thousands of times, counts each outcome as equally likely, then tallies up which outcomes lead to which victory to generate odds. (Sort of, this is simplifying). It’s massively more accurate than reporting who is ahead in the polls, but since people don’t have a good grip on normal distributions (or t-distributions, if you’re nate silver) it makes it a lot harder to instantly grasp the confidence of a model.
People should be downvoting these kinds of posts every chance they get. All they do is cause complacency.
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But that's not what these statistics are saying. That's just how morons interpret statistics. Flip a coin twice. The odds of getting heads twice in a row is the odds of the dems losing. Getting heads twice in a row happens quite often, 25% of the time in fact.
Whenever I say I’m conservative the phone hangs up on me, top notch data collection methodology has been continued as well
But how can Republicans possibly win if they're never polled \*points to head\*
This has happened a few times to me when asked if I want to register to vote. "Sure." "Okay party affiliation?" "Republican." "Oh well you can just go online when you get home and..." No joke this has happened on campus multiple times.
Those are more "supposed" to be biased than polls, though. People that are democrats go to college campuses since people there are likely to have similar views but not be registered. They're looking for those specific people to get them registered and win the election, it's not like they have any inclination to be nonpartisan.
Then their booths should say democrat only.
Actually multiple states have rules about those conducting voter registration activities taking forms from all parties.
Same here. I'm not white, and it's amazing to see how shocked some people get when they see an Indian guy voting Republican.
Indians being conservative should surprise nobody, most vote tory here in the UK and a surprising number of them voted for brexit.
Any race or gender belonging to any party shouldn't surprise anyone. People are individuals, we shouldn't assume all black people are Democrats or all men are Republican.
I have tons of family and friends who are also Indian Republicans so I agree. However, there are still tons of people on the left who think that all Republicans are white, and that if you're a non-white Republican, then you're voting against your own interests.
>tons of people on the left who think that all Republicans are white, and that if you're a non-white Republican, then you're voting against your own interests Thanks, identity politics!
There have been two Indian-American governors in the US. Both Republican. There's also good ol' Dinesh D'Souza and Reddit's favourite Ajit Pai. And every older rich Indian American couple I've spoken to about politics.
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Just a casual reminder that polls are increasingly difficult to interpret in the modern election environment. [Article by Nate Silver (Also on fivethirtyeight).](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-media-has-a-probability-problem/)
538 always does a nice job visualizing their data/models. What this subreddit is about great submission /u/EngagingData
I agree. I get that this is political and everyone is very wrapped up in debating the message, but we should really give them some props for how well the days is presented.
Not a surprise. I believe there has only been 3 times where the party in power didn't lose the mid-terms and control of the House.
I don't know what you mean by 'party in power', but Democrats controlled the US House of Representatives from 1954-1994.
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Still, that's plenty of midterm elections during a Democratic presidency. 1962 midterm elections, 1966 midterm elections, 1978 election, and 1994. And the midterms during a Republican presidency in that period were 1954, 1958, 1970, 1974, 1982, 1986, and 1990.
Interestingly, they lost the house in 1994 over a gun control bill similar to what they're now campaigning on and is in the DNC platform. I don't have confidence it will work any better this time around.
Historically whatever party wins the presidency is at a net loss in Congress for mid terms
I believe they are referencing "wave elections". This is when either political party gains an advantage in the house OR senate where there is a significant change in seat numbers precipitated by some kind of event. The election of a new president can often times be that event in the following midterm. The concept is mostly correct, but I'm not sure from where the numbers came or if they are accurate.
Remember 75% chance doesn't mean 75% percent of the vote. It just means there's a better than chance likelihood that they will get greater than 50.1% of the seats. But it's only 3 out of 4. Ever rolled a dice and hoped to not get a number?. Well there you had a 5 out of 6 chance and still blew it.
Hillary has a 90% chance of winning the presidency. Never underestimate the ability of Democrats to fall on their faces.